* Posts by Owen Carter

231 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Jul 2007

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Wikipedia to disclose user's IP address in blackmail case

Owen Carter
Grenade

@ac

The definition of blackmail says 'Money or soemothing of value'. You say 'I dont se emention of money so it is not blackmail'.

Do I really have to point out that if the only thing of value to you is money, then you are a very sad individual.

Maybe the 'Something' of value is career advancement, achieved by destroying or devaluing a colleague. Or it may even just be a classic bully thing; done because the perp gets a scully hard-on (something lots of AC's value) from slagging off others.

When algorithms attack, does Google hear you scream?

Owen Carter
FAIL

Example:

Google is basically doing the correct thing here for me as a consumer, but they are making a big mistake in allowing whitelisting or special consideration of -any- site in their index, they should focus on the algorithms and result relevence to consumers (and not result relevance for suppliers, search parasites, and media types).

If I search for:

'Carlos Fandango': I want the carlos fandoango homepage.

'Carlos Fandango sucks': I want commentary on the quality of Carlos Fandango

'Carlos Fandango Help': I want the manufacturers support site, or a good help forum

-None- of the above should ever return a shopping comparison site..ever. If such sites want to appear when I search these terms it should only be in the adverts, not in the search listings, and they can f***ing well pay for it.

Also if I search for:

Carlos Fandango Shop: I want sites that sell the products, not shopping comparison sites.

Basically there are a lot of parisitical sites, like Foundem, who's effect on the web, search and consumerism in general is long-term negative. The more proactive google is in setting it's algorithms so they favour direct consumer->supplier contact and reduce consumer->parasite->supplier results, the happier I will be.

I grudgingly admit that I'd have no problem with:

'Carlos Fandango Price Comparison': showing Foundem in the result list.

Facebook battles attack by child protection chief

Owen Carter
Big Brother

So.. lets get this straight.

The UK police want to 'in the name of child protection' get a button onto every UK myface users page.

I just had a look at the CEOP page, apart from the 'my god they are using M.Mcann to jerk a tear' moment I could not find any info about the 'button'. I was hoping to find a way I could link it to my site of course.. I want to know what it is, just a graphic you host yourself and a link? or must you cross-site link to them (making it a webbug) or worse, a full-blown flash/java/whatever applet, allowing all kinds of mischief.

Basically; if this is anything other than a self-hosted graphic and a url then they should steer really clear of it, police with intelligence community links, or those who work with them, are not the sort of people who should have any sort of ability to embed anything in anybody's website.

Oh, and it sounds like Facebook already have a good system in place, properly resourced, and one which uses social networking technologies and will be more familiar to frightened social network users than a shiny page full of platitudes and piss-poor HR speak.

Mark Cuban counsels Google-busting bribery

Owen Carter
Thumb Up

This might improve Google..

Basically, I rarely find what I want in the first five results anyway, after I've skipped past the pastebins, expertsexchange (amazing how they -always- have exactly the answer I want behind their paywall) and all the other SEO'd to hell wannabies and assorted loosers.

If Microsoft want to pay to take all this crap out of googles listings I'll be well happy.

3M shows 9in naked-eye 3D display

Owen Carter
Coat

lo! I missread that.

I'm sorry to drag this into the gutter but 'conoscopy' is the most unfortunate name for a new tech ever.. Even google thought I'd misspelled it.

Brit space agency to probe 'crackpot' antigravity device

Owen Carter
Grenade

Wow, the wisdom of crowds.

Fascinating bunch of comments above, the commentards are out in force, armed with a smattering of physics, a huge dose of arrogance, and a near inability to actually read the story.. specially the ones who are claiming he's a zero-point energy nut.

That's not what I read, whatever claims he's making, this is a net consumer of energy, not a provider. He's basically saying he can apply energy to a chamber and generate a thrust. His special claim is that there is no reaction medium (either thrust against the atmosphere, other objects, or ejected matter) specifically he seems to say it thrusts against the gravitational field itself. I don't see that as physically impossible, just technically impossible until now?

As for the people complaining they cannot see 'under' the test rig.. read the article..sheesh.. where it is clearly stated that the rig is on an air bearing. His thrust unit is angled to rotate the rig on that bearing, not lift it.

(This would be thrusting 'across' gravity, not 'along' it; so I'm not convinced the effect is real; but I am convinced a lot of posters here are applying some barely remembered schoolboy physics and repetition of mantras against perpetual motion to dismiss it with no real understanding of what is actually being claimed.)

Maybe I'm just too fond of the skyhooks that Rupert the Bears professor friend used to make. The thing is that there is a field, the gravitational field, that ruins through most everything. If we can find new ways to interact with that that we should be able to make some interesting devices.

Honda designs mainstream e-bikes

Owen Carter
Thumb Up

2 wheel drive.

2 wheel drive on bikes is interesting, a verrrry long time ago in 'Performance Bikes' there was a nutter who built a 2-wheel drive dirt bike; it had a wonderfully complex belt drive to the front wheel, and a differential. It was apparently really good to ride, different, but the driven front wheel really helped traction and stability. IIRC.

As for the style, it certainly shouts 'Cub' at me, I never had a C50, let alone a C90.. maybe I'll get my chance now :-)

How to upgrade an Acer Aspire One netbook's memory

Owen Carter
Go

Three things!

I've now had both of my A110's apart, and read/watched several of these guides both before and after my disassembly experience. There are three points to make about this article.

1) Removing the keyboard is, as usual in these guides, given a very short description. In fact it seems to be the item that gives most people problems. The trick is to use a flat blade to push back one tab, while simultaneously slipping a credit-card (or similar plastic item) between the edge of the case and keyboard. This makes the keyboard assembly pop past the first catch as it is depressed, and it will continue to push up on the assembly so it just pops out as you depress the next two catches.

2) I've never risked using a screwdriver between the case edges. My fingernails, slid into the join and gently run around it until the pieces pop apart, have always done the job without breaking or scratching anything.

3) You forgot to mention that the SSD has to be disconnected! (It's a similar connector to the keyboard/trackpad, so no great mystery)

Adding a gig of ram to these machines is a great way to spice them up. And if you have the skillz it brings another advantage... As standard the machine has 1/2 a gig of ram, and 1Gig of SSD used as swap (Oh, the humanity! swap on a SSD is not at all clever).

So once you have upgraded the ram, if you know how, boot from a USB stick with gparted on it and remove the swap partition (backup first!). Then expand the main partition and filesystem to fill that space. Bingo! your system still has the same total amount of memory as before (and it's all ram now) plus you have another gig of SSD available. On a 8G model this is really handy.

UFO wind turbine prang site sealed

Owen Carter
Black Helicopters

Solved?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/organgrinder/2009/jan/08/windpower-thesun

Naah.. not really, but an illuminating read nonetheless..

Grand jury fails to level charges in Palin hack case

Owen Carter
Black Helicopters

very dull indeed

"Little of political interest was exposed by the attack on Palin's gov.palin@yahoo.com webmail account,"

I'm not sure that's true.. a better phrasing might be

'No juicy sexual titbits were thrown into the US election media feeding frenzy by the attack..."

It was just shown that a 'law and order' candidate was/is doing political and governmental business from a personal mail account. That's should be quite interesting because it's illegal, but I guess dishonesty and hypocrisy are the norm in politics these days.

OiNK BitTorrent admin faces fraud prosecution

Owen Carter
Black Helicopters

Fraud?

Interesting, How has he defrauded the Media industry exactly?

For this to be fraud surely he would have had to obtain money from them (or others) by offering a service or goods which were not delivered.. If the Media industry has no contract or supplier relationship with him, how can he defraud them? Seems to me that the only people he could have defrauded are the OiNK members.

Maybe he will be charged with supplying 'fake' copyright infringing goods? Or deceiving members into thinking they were getting multimedia files when in fact delivering no such thing (random data?) Will there be a big queue of OiNK member lining up to tell the court how he promised to supply illegal downloads and pre-releases to them, but did not deliver..

Or maybe this is a deliberate 'wrong' charge in order to let him get away and therefore justify even more draconian copyright laws.

Also; since the media biz. is almost exclusively based in the US why was he not 'Gary'd' and fast tracked to the US to face charges there? Surely the US courts with the DMCA etc.. to call upon would be the venue of choice for such a mastercriminal?

McKinnon loses Lords appeal

Owen Carter
Alert

RE: coward...

I'm sorry about your violent fantasies, I guess someone stupid enough to fit mickey mouse locks is someone stupid enough to attack without thinking.

I'f I'd attacked the guilty looking youth I found in my parents house many years ago, (by pushing him down the stairs, I considered it..), I'd have maimed or killed my sisters new boyfriend, who was sneaking out. Not that he wasn't a total twat.. and definitely not supposed to be there, but it would have been disproportionate all the same.

Owen Carter

Military or Civilian trial in the US?

Disgust resistered as a matter of course, since the UK is now in full 'bend over, drop your trousers and take it like a man' mode with America.

My biggest fear is that it still seems unclear if the w^Hyanks want to try him in a military court (in which case he'll die in prison) or give him a civilian trial. Has anybody been able to get them to confirm which it will be? would the law lords have willingly sent him to face possible military 'justice'?

A civilian trial in the states would probably be OK, especially since he is high-profile enough to get a decent defence, which will be able to demolish this smokescreen about how much he 'cost' them (*) how much damage he caused, and important he is vs. all the other dark actors who were hacking these systems at the same time.

Basically he has already been punished more than enough for his 'crime'. And a civilian trial could probably prove this; the US government is not the only organisation with slick lawyers.

(*) To anybody foolish enough to believe the Americans claims on this; if you fit a mickey-mouse lock to your house and someone breaks in to use the toilet and steal a newspaper, the cost of fitting a proper lock is not their responsibility. They can only be done for trespass, emitting noxious substances, and theft of goods worth 50p.

Japanese customs reunited with lost dope

Owen Carter
Flame

Transfer Passengers beware.

As 'StopthePropaganda' noted above, if this person had transferred, or simply not checked all their bags pockets before flying again they could have been in vast trouble.

Take the UAE (United Arab Emirates) for instance, even the bloody whiff of the stuff could get them done. Things have gotten very scary stupid out there:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-512815/Briton-jailed-years-Dubai-customs-cannabis-weighing-grain-sugar-shoe.html

It must be bad when I start agreeing with the Daily Heil on a drugs story..

Captain Cyborg creates human bat with Reg baseball cap

Owen Carter
Boffin

Sigh...

...but it's an ethical minefield - is rewiring our brains like this a step too far?

The journo who wrote the above on the BBC site certainly has nothing to fear, they have no brain to rewire. Certainly not one capable of comprehension, anyway.

Extreme porn bill gets final reading

Owen Carter
Flame

PS:

I got my date wrong. In fact May 10th (two days away) is the correct date.

http://www.ushmm.org/research/library/bibliography/index.php?content=1933_bookburning

Owen Carter
Coat

Been done before..

"But there may be a need for an amnesty, during which the public are able to hand in any material that could be considered a crime to possess."

I know, why don't the authorities just organise outdoor sessions where we could burn them, say on the solstice. We could have a real "Säuberung" by fire then.

Pillock.

I've got my coat, will the last one out please turn off the lights.

Dutch transit card crippled by multihacks

Owen Carter
Thumb Down

I use it often on Amsterdams Metro

Yet another IT geek in Amsterdam..

I've had one of these for a year now and use it a lot. The whole roll-out is a farce. We've had the portal gates installed for ages. But one always stands open, with attendants at the head of the stairs to do the real checking, (at least they are a relatively cheerful lot). Some of the portals have now failed, and the card purchase/recharge machines are often broke. many stations only have one of these, so I end up 'Zwart Rijden' (black riding) just because I cannot add credit to my card. The machines themselves are a classic example of cheap stuff done badly.

Some of the more secure cards (only the temporary cards that suffer the security problems) are supposed to auto-recharge from your bank-account when they drop below 5Eur credit. Mine fails to do this; but given the crapness of these idiots that comes as a relief, they'd probably just take random amounts..

There was a fantastic incident when they were demonstrating this new kit to the press, first the chief guest's card failed to work. Then a flunky used a 'pre-prepared' card to open the portal, which promptly tried to close as they walked through, crunch. Sums it up really.

---------------

The real problem is that the individual transport companies (GVB in amsterdam, RET in Rotterdam, others elsewhere) are hopeless. Truly Hopeless, in fact more than that; pathetically hopeless and then some.. with knobs on.

In Amsterdam we have; Electronic platform signs that are often just plain wrong, or display random errors and garbled text. Sporadic cleaning, poor maintenance of everything, years old graffiti in the trains.

- Train drivers who are antisocial and lazy, at my local terminus they don't stop where the stairs are, they stop at the other end, where the coffee machine is. Another favourite of the drivers is turning the heating off in the winter and leaving the doors open at the terminus's. In summer, the heating gets turned on and the doors left in auto-close.

- But the sh1tness goes all the way to the top too. There is a singular inability to roll out new kit, the chipcard is just part of this.. I suspect the drivers attitude comes partly from working for a bunch of obvious tossers who's chief skill is shifting blame down the foodchain.

Last week a metro derailed in the tunnel near central station, it took them over an hour to get the power turned off and checked. The flack from this (the fire service in particular are livid..) might just bring some improvement, but I doubt it. Working in Dutch public transport is a sinecure.

These days I mostly ride my bike, but when I came here my initial experience of the system was a shock. They managed to be worse then the UK.. and that takes some doing.

Odeon kicks Rambo in the 'nads

Owen Carter
Stop

be kind.

Well, the size and power of Sly's weapon no longer intrigues me the way it used to. Guess I've grown up even if 'the Motion Pictire Industry (tm)' has not... Plus Mark Kermode gave it a right royal slagging on the beeb film podcast :-)

The one to watch surely has to be 'Be Kind, Rewind'. J.Ross tried to dismiss it by saying it looked like 'a load of joined together YouTube clips'. But I thought "Cool!", I have seen far more creativity and general entertainment from random Internet video than Hollywood recently.

I just hope that the tireless parade of sequals pasing for the mainstream movies these days are the final fire sale of this not very creative 'industry'.

Sociologists: Studying engineering turns you into a terrorist

Owen Carter
Alien

@DeFex

Errr.. whilst the fuzzy thinking is just as evident in both groups, we're ragging on the Sociologists here. We'll do for the Scientologists later..

Growing virus production taxes security firms

Owen Carter
Coat

@ JimC

Great idea. How do we do it?

- Well, it starts with managers, architects and developers thinking of security as a absolute requirement.. Rather than a nice-to-have that must never get in the way of project schedules or looking cool. With them being intellectually capable of rejecting a whole function, program, architecture, standard or even technology, no matter how leet, if It cannot be made secure.

- Basically, we have to make poor security something that is so expensive, either monetarily, or in terms of a social stigma, that the crap wonks who previously have not cared either go bust or get driven out of the industry (and that includes the OSS community, how about banning commits from anybody who fails to correctly parse arguments, or puts data into a buffer without checking it's bounds?)

Good security starts with a good attitude.

Online gamer murders rival clan member

Owen Carter
Flame

The difference between guns hammers cars and games

As usual the 'You don't blame cars/drink etc.. for all the deaths they cause' mob are out.

Well, I do, but at least they have a genuine positive benefit too; Make a list of these (such as getting you places, or helping you to forget about the crap some people believe).

Now consider Handguns, Assault Rifles, Combat Knives, Samurai Swords, and the vast array of other -pure weapons- out there. Please list some real uses for these, apart from hurting people.

If you can't tell the difference between these two lists, you are not really thinking clearly; Notice how guns and knives used by people with a need (farmers, sportsmen, cooks and builders etc..) focus on function, not menace and concealability. Why are you so keen to defend things that have no other use than massaging the egos of violent losers? Are you an arms dealer? Since they are the only group who derive benefit from this culture.

People kill People, often because they have a gun and think it's the same as winning the argument.

Super Soaker inventor touts solid state heat-2-leccy

Owen Carter
Happy

Cool! or Hot! or something in between :-)

What I can't see on their site is any mention of how great the temperature differential needs to be to generate at a good efficiency.

As the article points out, almost all serious electricity generation directly uses a heat differential (*), but they rely on a high differential, superheated steam or sodium vs. atmospheric temp.

What would be really good is if this could use a much smaller differential. Imagine roads/roofs with this as a 'layer' between them and the subsurface, where you get power generated on a warm day. If it could work with a differential of just a few degrees, then the possibilities are endless, even in a cold climate there are often differences of several degrees between sea and sky, soil and bedrock.

Solar collecting becomes easier since the biggest problem most solar furnaces seem to face is that they have to be, err, furnaces. Using lots of high-maintenance moving parts to focus the sun to a fixed point so a high temperature difference can be created. Now imagine if they simply had a heat absorbant plate, connected through this to cooler bedrock underneath. All solid state and low maintenance..

Of course, if it's as expensive (environmentally and economically) as solar panels per sq. meter then it would suffer the same fate..

Owen.

(*) In fact even wind/wave power indirectly utilises heat differentials; they help power the weather. As far as I know only solar panels and tidal power are not reliant on some form of heat difference.

YouTube biker clocked at 189mph

Owen Carter
Go

Not as good as..

If all the other bikers in the crowd want to watch a youtube video that will have them twitching, try searching for 'Paris Ring Road'. Total madness.

It's the counter-example to this, huge speed in the wrong conditions..

World Cup Willie company loses case on own evidence

Owen Carter
Boffin

1966 was a very good year

For all the 'merkins and other outcasts, the key here is that the sport is Football (the sort played with feet and not hands), and the year is 1966..

Which by some weird coincidence is also the year England won the football world cup, a fact that I'm sure is purely co-incidental to this attempt to commandeer, err, register, 'World Cup Willie'.

MP warns against Microsoft monopoly in e-gov services

Owen Carter
Gates Horns

Angela Eagle: Shill, Troll or Idiot? discuss

"Some open source projects cannot meet our needs for quality or security"

But windows does?

O2 Cocoon mobile phone

Owen Carter
Gates Horns

The phone lacks one thing and the review lacks another..

Why don't manufacturers put a standard 3.5m jack in music phones? My SPV is the same as this, uses some crappy proprietary plug and they charge you a fortune for a new set of headphones. It was cheaper to buy a new MP3 player than it was to replace the orange (nothing special except the price) headphones.

- I know they also need to add a mic. and other control lines too.. but there are ways of dealing with that.

- And yes, it comes with a 'adapter', but I'll bet the adapter has crummy strain relief, breaks after reasonable use, and costs a fortune to replace (if you can even buy it separately).

As for the review, yet again we are not told about how the phone synchronises.. Just mac and windows info and no discussion aboutr wether it mounts as a USB drive (and is therefore compatible with pretty much everything.)

- Simon; this is, unfortunately, in the finest tradition of el-reg reviews.. Please, please give a overview of the sync method (USB filesystem, vs. proprietary/activesync/telepathy) and then note any handy apps they supply for specific OS's. Ta.

Use of web archive was not hacking, says US court

Owen Carter

Is this really about revisionism?

I don't get it. The Issue here seems to read as revisionism, someone is being sued for reading a past version of a document, which was once in the public domain. The technical details of the case (copyright, blah, hacking, blah) is just a vehicle being used by someone to try and suppress something that they no longer want public.

Imagine this same data had been published and distributed in a paper document. And then the authors subsequently decided that they did not want people to read it; so they gathered up all the copies they could find and published a new version of the same paper with different contents.

Would they be able to sue you if you found a original copy that someone had helpfully placed in a local library? Would it be a crime to read it? Would it be inadmissible in court as proof of anything?

Music pirate convicted in Led Zep bootleg case

Owen Carter

Ripping off?

Says the man from the BPI:

"He'd amassed a huge personal fortune by ripping off musicians, record labels, music publishers, and the state, but justice has finally caught up with him,"

So, no mention of the general public then..

That figures, I guess that only the BPI's puppetmasters are allowed to rip us off.

Brainless civil servant amazes doctors

Owen Carter

In literature

If anyone else remembers 'The Wasp Factory' by Iain Banks, they'll know why this story made me shiver.

Trojan creates bogus webmail accounts to punt drugs

Owen Carter

Maybe the craptcha is done by the bot host.

What I'd do is:

1) Bot a Bod's PC

2) Wait until aforesaid bod logs in.

3) Take the Craptcha image from Hotmail/whoever and reframe it in a Windows dialog with a heading like

'Microsoft Windows Genuine Disadvantage needs to verify a real user is accessing this Computer', 'Please enter the word contained in the image to verify you have not been a victim of software piracy..'

4) Use that to create the account.

5) Profit...

Social engineering, sigh.. I know several people who would probably happily fill in 10 such craptchas a day if they believed it was genuine.

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